Category: rr12 Jera

Heideggerian Eternal Return

NOTE: In the Xotinx we translate Heidegger’s “Sein” not as “Being” but “To-Be” or “ToBe”

#RUNE der (E-Hod) #Jera (Eternal Return) Anyone who wants to understand the Xotinx, must have an understanding of #Heidegger. Much of the POV of the Xotinx is formulated thru a kind of “Heideggerian Eternal Return”. Western Occultism may call this Eternal Return, RITUAL MAGIC.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George #Orwell, 1984.

Understanding Heidegger’s Nietzche’s ETERNAL RETURN (der & dor #Jera) is like grasping Water. We can not understand Water until we become Water. We can not understand ‘Eternal Return’ until we become the Eternal Return. This can become possible thru the Xotinx in the Realization of No-Thing-ness (der & dor #Berkano). The usual Hod (state of consciousness) that we understand Eternal Return is in the Æ-Hod (dær #Æhwaz). This is the State of consciousness we would call the Intellectual, Scholarly, Logic etc. It is a calculative Hod that projects into ‘Reality’ Time & Space. This Æ-Hod tries to comprehend Eternal Return in Time & Space but it’s Understanding of Eternal Return is an Ossification of No-Thing-ness. Only when we move into an E-Hod (der or dor #Ehwaz) or the O-Hod (der or dor #Othala) can we begin to appreciate the Eternal Return. –Tiwaz

To understand the Runes, for example we have to understand the NOW (present). This is done thru a Heideggerian NOW, as unveiled (#Aletheia) explored in “Sein und Zeit” (Being and Time) thru a methodology Heidegger calls “Hermeneutics” . We will simply call this HEIDEGGERIAN ETERNAL RETURN. When we use Heideggerian Eternal Return to understand the Runes in this NOW we can understand the Runes of the past-future. This understanding of the past-future, thru the “Heideggerian Eternal Return”, gives us a deeper understand of the Runes in the NOW. This deeper understanding of the NOW, in turn, thru the “Heideggerian Eternal Return”, gives us a deeper understanding of the past-future, etc. until we finally consciously fall into a kind of #Nietzsche ian Abyss unveiling “Open-To-Be” (Enlightenment, Buddha-hood, Godhood, O-Hod).

“Open-To-Be” is not a linear THING with a past-present-future. It is in the NOW revealed thru the “Heideggerian Eternal Return”. Past-present-future are TIME & SPACE projections of Open-To-Be thru the Eternal Return, that ossifies thru projection into Time & Space as THINGS. Science deals with THINGS and can not understand “Open-To-Be” because there is NO-THING to understand. All THINGS, all thoughts, emotions, physicality must fall away before “Open-To-Be” can fully reveal itself as Enlightenment, Buddha-hood, Godhood, O-Hod, XOT-HOD.

To get a handle on Heidegger, it’s best to start with the source book, BEING IN TIME by Heidegger. If you can read Deutsch it’s even better to read the original SEIN UND ZEIT by Heidegger. A very helpful book that will give you a handle of what “Sein und Zeit” is saying is – Commentary on Heidegger’s Being And Time : Michael Gelven.

NOTES:

BEING & TIME

III.INTRODUCTION

Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit first appeared in German in 1927; the English translation, Being and Time, appeared in 1962.1 Since the appearance of this work, the reputation and influence of its author has spread to such international dimensions that it may be said that Heidegger is the most important and widely influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Even now, as the century enters its final decade, no thinker is more significant in terms of intellectual impact and controversy. There are many who deeply resent his works, who detest his personal association with Nazism in 1933, who defy his most fundamental principles. But even among these, his most ardent enemies, he is recognized as the singular dominating force with which to be reckoned. Among his countless admirers he is considered the greatest European philosopher since Immanuel Kant. Interest in this Freiburg philosopher is in no way waning; indeed the future seems to promise ever expanding respect, and in some cases even reverence, for his vast accomplishments. Although Heidegger has written voluminously since 1927, there remains little doubt that Being and Time will continue to be recognized as his major work, and shall be for many decades to come.

Open-To-Be

Aletheia

Heidegger’s idea of aletheia, or disclosure (Erschlossenheit), was an attempt to make sense of how things in the world appear to human beings as part of an opening in intelligibility, as “unclosedness” or “unconcealedness”. It is closely related to the notion of world disclosure, the way in which things get their sense as part of a holistically structured, pre-interpreted background of meaning. Initially, Heidegger wanted aletheia to stand for a re-interpreted definition of truth. However, he later corrected the association of aletheia with truth. See main article on aletheia for more information.

ETERNAL RETURN

In Bk 3 part Two of ‘Nietzsche’ Heidegger says:

“Reckoned chronologically, Nietzsche pursued the thought of the eternal return of the same before he conceived of the will to power, even though intimations of the latter may be found every bit as early…Nietzsche himself was never able to explicitly think through its [eternal return of the same] with will to power as such, nor elevate it into a metaphysical conception. The reason for this is not that the thought remained in any way obscure to him, but that like all meta physicians prior to him, Nietzsche was unable to find his way back to the fundamental traits of the guiding metaphysical projection. For the general traits of the metaphysical projection of beings upon being ness, and thereby the representation of beings as such in the domain of presence and permanence, can be known only when we come to experience that projection as historically cast.” (p. 164)

‘Recurrence’ understood as a principle in a metaphysics of becoming is the permanentizing of what becomes: it is the point where becoming of what becomes (eg., an entity) is secured in the duration of its becoming.

The ‘eternal’ is the point where the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself.

HEIDEGGERIAN

Heidegger’s fame and reputation have developed to such an extent that he is now recognized as the single most important thinker in the twentieth century. The labels of twenty years ago have, thankfully, fallen away, and Heidegger is seen as a figure of such stature that there is no adequate label to designate him except his own name. The far-reaching impact of his thought promises to extend well into the future.

Heidegger asserts that a phenomena can be grasped in and for themselves in immediate perception. The function of language (logos) is to reveal what phenomena show. However language has a different Being from the phenomena it describes, so the danger is that language will only a ‘appear’ to tell us what the phenomena is. In other words, the inherent danger of describing phenomena in language is that the Being of language (because it is different from the Being of phenomena) can effectively a cover up the being of phenomena.

Therefore, in order to sort out the covering up of language from the truth of language, we need a method of interrogating language which is both systematic and reflexive enough to hopefully alert us to any potential covering ups. This method is what Heidegger calls, “hermeneutics,” or the business of interpretation. As Heidegger asserts – our investigation will show that the meaning of phenomenological description, as a method, lies in interpretation. It is therefore through hermeneutics, as a systematising approach to interpreting, that the authentic meaning of Being can be articulated. Language, in the form of words (logos), when it represents the phenomenology of Dasein, always has the character of hermeneutics. [ref. ¶7, page 61 – 62] There are three points about this to bear in mind.

The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the a primordial signification of the word. That is, in the sense that hermeneutics can be defined simply and most primordially as the business of interpreting (although see point 3 for more clarification).

Because of the priority of Dasein over other entities for working out the question of Being, it follows that, through the hermeneutics of Dasein, the horizon for any further a ontological study will be revealed.

The ontical condition for the possibility of historiology contains the roots of what can be called ‘hermeneutic’ only in its vaguest sense. When we think about this in the context of the derivative sense of the methodology of those human sciences which are historiological in character, it becomes clear that unless we can articulate a hermeneutic of Dasein’s historicity in an ontological way, it is not a true hermaneutic. This reiterates the point that Hermeneutics when applied to Dasein does not mean interpretation, in the sense that the two terms are precisely synonymous, but rather that Hermeneutics should be consideres as a “science of interpretation” in that it systematises the interpretation using a conscious method. [ref. ¶7, page 61 – 62]

NOTHING

This inquiry into Nothing presupposes a thinking capable of grasping “Being in its own truth and truth as “aletheia” and of reestablishing the relation between man and Being. This is what Heidegger calls substantial thinking (das wesentliche Denken). (14) Thus, inquiry into Nothing leads thinking beyond metaphysics and by attempting to reestablish the relation between man and Being is expected to change “the essence of man”. (15) http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContIyi.htm

THINGS

The term entities is used strategically throughout Being and Time, so that Heidegger can avoid talking about “things”. This is because the term “things” already presupposes an understanding of their existence, which Heidegger thinks is false and seeks to contest. As he points out, we are on dangerous ground even by addressing entities as ‘Things’, for in doing so we have “tacitly anticipated their ontological character”. This was, in a nutshell, the mistake of Descartes and his forebears. Heidegger argues if you talk about the world in terms of things, the only “thing” you are ever going to uncover is the totally erroneous conception of the “Thinghood and Reality.” [ref. ¶ 15, page 95]

ToBe

Since the whole of Being and Time is an attempt to answer the question, “What is Being?”, it would be a little presumptions of me to attempt a summary here. However, there are three preliminary remarks that can be extracted from the ontological tradition in philosophy, that will help us initially to clarify the question:

1/ “Being is not a genus”.
It has been maintained that Being is the most universal of concepts, thus an understanding of Being is presupposed in our conceiving of anything as an entity. Being transcends any categorical distinction we care to make in our apprehension of the world. It does this by existing above and beyond any notion of a category that we can form in our understanding.

2/ Being is indefinable.
The term entity cannot be applied to Being because it cannot be defined using traditional logic, (i.e. a technique for understanding which derives its terms either from higher general concepts, or by recourse to ones of lower generality). In other words, because Being is neither a thing nor a genus it follows that it cannot be defined according to logic, whose job is to set out the rules that govern the categorisation of phenomena and concepts.

3/ Being is self-evident
Whenever one thinks about anything, or makes an assertion, or even asks a question; some use is made of Being. But the intelligibility of Being, in this sense, is only an average sort of intelligibility (common sense understanding). This average intelligibility is also indicative of its scholarly unintelligibility, i.e., the way that the question: “what is Being?”, is often ignored in philosophical investigations. [ref. ¶ 1, page 22 – 23]

Subsequently Heidegger elaborated a more considered conceptualising of Being into five characteristics:

1/ Dasein is a Being who understands that it exists, and what is more the Being of Dasein is, in part, shaped by that understanding.

2/ The above statement can be seen to serves as a working definition of the formal conception of existence,

3/ Dasein exists and moreover Dasein and existence are one. For example if Dasein is ‘the human Being’ and existence is ‘the world,’ then Dasein and the world are one. The consequence of this is that Dasein and existence cannot be separated – even analytically separated.

4/ Dasein is also an entity which I myself am. In other words each one of us (as human Beings) defines existence in terms of our own existence, a concept that Heidegger terms Mineness. Therefore the only way that Being can be understood is as My Being.’ This applies even when Being and Dasein are considered in general.

5/ Mineness belongs to any existent Dasein, in the sense that how I regard ‘my Being’, creates the conditions that make authenticity and inauthenticity possible. [ref. ¶ 12, page 78]

The Eight Disciplines of Yoga
Yogic practice is comprised of eight types or “limbs” of
discipline. They were first codified by Patanjali, who compiled
his Yoga Sutras in the fifth or sixth century B.C., based
upon the teachings of various Yoga sects. The eight disciplines
are:
(l)Yama (abstention from evil conduct)
(2)Niyama (virtuous conduct)
(3)Asana (physical postures)
(4)Pranayama (regulation of the breath)
(5)Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses)
(6)Dharana (concentration)
(7)Dhyana (meditation)
(8)Samadhi (union of subject and object)
These disciplines may be classified into five groups:
(1) Moral training: Yama, Niyama. Purification and harmonization
of the mind.
(2) Physical training: Asana, Pranayama. Regulation of vital
energy and blood circulation; regulation of nervous
and muscle functions.
(3) Mental training: Pratyahara, Dharana. Breaking
through the shell of the self through introversion and
the control of consciousness.
(4) Spiritual training: Dhyana. Attaining superconsciousness
and contact with spiritual beings.
(5) Samadhi: Oneness with the Divine, the highest stage of
spiritual development.

Remember this Evening is dun Eve dus Milk Full Moon, a Tide auspicious for Cupid Cosmic Consciousness. It is especially auspicious because it falls on Frigg – Freyja ‘s Day = Fri-Day. Frigg is dan Goddess who rules over Marriages & Freyja over Ferrility. If there is someone “Special” this is dun Tide to do something “Special”.

When r Scientists going to discover that Women & Men “synchronize their mating behaviour with the lunar cycle”?

z Menstruation derives from the Latin Menses meaning Month
z d Menstrual Cycle is exactly a Lunar Month 29.5 Days
z Period of normal Gestation is 265.8 Days or precisely 9 Lunar Months
zz If you r Fertilized at Easter Birth would be 1st Full Moon after Yule Tide

“most auspicious time seems to be a day before full moon {{which is TODAY May 4!}} …and also full-moon day (but not the day after full moon).”
–American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology

If your Cycle is out of synch, doing Full Moon “Rituals” will help bring your Cycle back in harmony with Cosmic Consciousness. If Frogs r in harmony w Cosmic Consciousness u too can can become in harmony w Cosmic Consciousness.

Frigg (also Frigga) is a major goddess in dam Xoting. She is Odin’s Wife-Sister and the queen of Asgard.[1] She has d power of prophecy yet she does not reveal what she knows.[2] Frigg is described as the only one other than Odin who is permitted to sit on his high seat Hlidskjalf and look out over the universe. D English term Friday derives from the Anglo-Saxon name for Frigg, Frige.[3] Old Norse Frigg (genitive Friggjar), Old SaxonFri, and Old EnglishFrig are derived from Common GermanicFrijjō.[5] Frigg is cognate with Sanskritprīyā́ which means “wife.”[5] The root also appears in Old Saxon fri which means “beloved lady”, in Swedish as fria (“to propose for marriage”) and in Icelandic as frjá which means “to love.”[5]

Around the world, frogs and toads synchronise their mating behaviour with the lunar cycle, scientists discover.

For frogs, timing is everything

This global phenomenon has never been noticed before, but frogs, toads and newts all like to mate by moonlight.

The animals use the lunar cycle to co-ordinate their gatherings, ensuring that enough males and females come together at the same time.

In doing so the creatures maximise their spawning success and reduce their odds of being eaten.

Details of the discovery are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Biologist Rachel Grant of the Open University was studying salamanders near a lake in central Italy for her PhD in 2005 when she noticed toads all over the road, under a full Moon.

“Although this might have been a coincidence, the following month I went along the same route every day at dusk and found that the numbers of toads on the road increased as the Moon waxed, to a peak at full Moon, and then declined again,” she says.

…”We analysed the data, and found a lunar effect at all three sites,” Grant says.

For example, the common toad (Bufo bufo) arrives at all its breeding sites, mates and spawns around the full Moon. The common frog (Rana temporaria) also spawns around the time of the full Moon.

…The researchers have also looked at historical data collected in Java on the Javanese toad (Bufo melanostictus) and found that it too mates by the lunar cycle, with females ovulating on or near to the full Moon.

Women, Orangutans and the Moon

Nothing could have surprised me more when I began my menstrual flow at the dark of the moon in October, 2004. I am post-menopausal and haven’t bled for 2½ years. Why did this happen? … Could my own focus on menstruation actually bring on a period after such a time? Perhaps it was because we were two weeks away from a total lunar eclipse and I was feeling the lure of the mistress of tides.
… The paper reflects on the physical and cultural connection between human menstruation and the moon and questions what effect the moon might have on orangutan biology and cultural development.
…
Traditionally the length of a woman’s menstrual cycle has been defined as 28 days or the length of the lunar cycle. Lunar cycles are actually 29.5 days and studies have shown that a woman’s cycle may normally be anywhere between 23 and 35 days, the average being described as 29.1 days [4] to 29.5 days. [5]
Shuttle and Redgrove cite the research of Walter and Abraham Menaker [6] who compare the mean length of the menstrual cycle at 29.5 days with the length of the synodic lunar month[7] of 29.5 days. They show that the mean duration of pregnancy from last menses is precisely 9.5 lunar months. In going back to conception, the mean duration of pregnancy is nine lunar months; therefore, it is likely that a child conceived on a given day of the lunar month would be born on a corresponding day nine months later. The Menakers counted more than 120,000 births in a New York City hospital during 13 lunar months and found that fewer births occurred on the day of the new moon than on any other day. This is what would be expected if more women tend to have their periods at this time than any other. Full moon days, however, had more births, which is also what you would expect if people tended to ovulate on the full moon.

{“The sidereal month is the time the Moon takes to complete one full revolution around the Earth with respect to the background stars. However, because the Earth is constantly moving along its orbit about the Sun, the Moon must travel slightly more than 360° to get from one new moon to the next. Thus, the synodic month, or lunar month, is longer than the sidereal month. A sidereal month lasts 27.322 days, while a synodic month lasts 29.531 days.”SOURCE:http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/sidereal.html}

The Menakers did two other studies at private hospitals, each looking at 250,000 pregnant women. Once again, the new moon was associated with fewer births and the full moon with an increase of them. They found that births on day fourteen, the full moon, when the Menakers postulated the likelihood of ovulation occurring, deviated “to an extraordinary extent above the mean.”[8] They concluded that there is a small but statistically significant synodic lunar influence on the human birth-rate, and presumably on the conception rate and the ovulation rate.

{Menakers 1959, “most auspicious time seems to be a day before full moon…and also full-moon day (but not the day after full moon).” –American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology}

…
… McClintock studied 135 women in her dorm during her senior year, found statistical evidence of menstrual synchrony and published the results in the prestigious journal, Nature in 1973.[9] McClintock postulated that human pheromones were the cause of the menstrual synchronization found with women who live together.

…
Winifred Cutler, at Wayne State University, studied women who had 29.5 ±1 day menstrual cycles and found there is an increased propensity for menstruation at or about the full moon.[11]
There is earlier historical evidence of women synchronizing their periods with each other and with the moon. The Temne are the largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone, having been in the current location since at least the 14th century. Largely rural, they live in small villages of about ten households. Even the larger towns have small clan-based enclosures.[12]

…
… Thomas Buckley studied the Yurok Indians in northwestern California and visited an Indian friend who told him that because his wife was “on her moontime,” she went into seclusion for ten days, cooking and eating her own food by herself.[16] Later, the wife told Buckley that she learned from her aunts and grandmothers that a menstruating woman should isolate herself because this is the time she is at the height of her powers. She was told that in old-time village life, all of the household’s fertile women who were not pregnant menstruated at the same time, a time dictated by the moon. Further, if a woman got out of synchronization with the moon and the other women, she could “get back in by sitting in the moonlight and talking to the moon, asking it to balance [her.]”[17] …
Regarding the use of the moon in restoring menstrual synchrony, Buckley notes recent biological research and findings. The timing of ovulation in humans can be manipulated by exposure to light relatively stronger than that to which subjects are accustomed at a given time of day or night.[18] Buckley describes further research by Dewan, Menkin and Rock[19] which demonstrated that the onset of menstruation itself may be directly affected by the exposure of ovulating women to light during sleep. The researchers found that by exposing ovulating women to the light of a 100-watt bulb during the 14th to 16th nights of their cycles caused the menstrual cycles to become regular, with a significant number of 41 experimental subjects entraining [20] to a 29-day cycle. The three to four nights of exposure was based on the natural duration of full moonlight during the lunar month.

Doing contemporary research on women’s menstrual synchrony with the moon is difficult because of the change in the amount of light exposure we have had in the last hundred years due to the widespread use of electricity. As I read more about this issue, two questions came to mind: When did human synchrony with the moon first occur and why? The previous studies mentioned here seem to show that women’s menstrual cycles are influenced by a certain amount of light and that pheromones excreted by women can keep them synchronized.

…

… it appears that Homo was eating far better than Australopithecus. Although many anthropologists believed this was based on meat-eating, there is evidence that regular meat eating began to occur earlier, about 2.5 million years ago. It is hard to explain the long delay before the new species appeared. Wrangham’s theory is that Australopithecus learned to use fire to cook food which improved the digestibility and range of plant foods. He believes that it is also possible that the cooking of meat was highly significant. Thus, the availability of more, digestible food which was cooked shortened the change from Australopithecus into the first human genus, Homo. Why is the cooking of meat important beyond the change in body size and stature? Having cooked food items may have had a profound change on the social and sexual system of early humans.[24] If food items had to be accumulated into a small area and retained there for several minutes or hours to be cooked, larger males would have stolen food from females. Females needed to protect their hard-won food supplies and bonded with certain males to help them protect their food from scroungers. Therefore, females who were more sexually attractive all the time obtained a higher quality of food guardian. To Wrangham, this would explain why early female humans evolved menstrual cycles which allowed sex to occur at any time.

…
Knight’s model involves a strong bonding of females for it to work. He suggests that women ovulated at full moon and thus menstruated at the dark of the moon. Women had to agree that menstrual bleeding meant no sex. The men therefore used this time to hunt, going away from the women and children and returning with meat. Even though not all women were menstruating because some were pregnant or lactating, all women had to collectively share in the symbolic protection of the menstruants to make sure that all the women would share in the meat. Since the females were capable of mating at any time during the cycle, the advantage for all women to agree to no sex at a particular time allowed for better food resources and at the same time, gave support to pregnant women and young children. The tribe then would have better child survival and as it grew, women could benefit from shared knowledge from mothers and grandmothers.
The men would also have to develop a bond which would not allow anyone to stay behind and have access to the women. It would also be important that women in nearby tribes would be synchronizing their cycles and withdrawing from sex, so that they men would not have access to other women. If the men from other tribes were hunting at the same time, it would benefit them to hunt collectively, which might be needed in order to capture and kill the large herbivores of the Upper Paleolithic time period with primitive weapons. Since men could sometimes be away for long periods, they would have a deadline of bringing home the meat — the full moon, which is when the women would be ovulating. As the meat was brought back, celebration and sexual contact began again. Thus, the full moon celebrations were the foundation for much more than the night sky, they celebrated the return of sexual relations, feasting and the success of the contract.
Judy Grahn argues that men were more interested in the hunt because it drew blood and allowed them to participate in “parallel menstrual rites.”[28] As women created menstrual rituals and seclusion rites, men too had to create rites of their own, centered on the same subject.[29] These “parallel menstruation rites” involve bloodletting and even visionary or hallucinatory states. According to Grahn, the point of the men’s rites, which include the hunt, especially for creatures with horns in lunar shapes, goes beyond the need for meat to the need for the power the men envisioned menstrual blood to have. After all, women were connected to the moon, the waxing and waning of the night light; their blood was considered analogous to such forces as water, “a moving force capable of causing chaos or death.”[30]
To share in the power of the menstruating woman, according to Grahn, men used hunting seclusions similar to the menstrual seclusions to entrain with the light, water and other elements of the natural world. The connection with the blood of the animals they killed may have also have brought them the power they sought.
Craig Stanford, although not writing about menstruation but about meat-eating and human evolution, supports the idea that in all human societies from forager to pastoralist to farmer, meat is a highly valued food resource, accorded a status far beyond its nutritional worth.[31] He believes that the role of meat in human society has never been merely nutritional, and compares humans to chimpanzees, who use meat to secure and maintain political alliances, to publicly snub rivals, and at times to attract estrous females.
During the time of human cultural development, I believe, in concert with Grahn and Knight, the moon continued to be a signal for women to bond together, menstruate at the same time and to develop art, music, dance and ritual. Men too, then, learned to live by the phases of the moon, developing their own rituals, and seeking the power they saw in the female form and blood.

…

{SEE ALSO The Full Moon’s Pull on Fertility: How Lunaception can Affect a Woman’s Menstrual Cycle}

[2] Metaformic theory is the basis for Grahn’s book which describes metaforms, the act or form of instruction that makes a connection between menstruation and a mental principle (20). Grahn uses rituals, myths, patterns, words, art, body ornament and even food to show how menstruation is at the heart of human culture.

[7] Arne Sollberger in his book, Biological Rhythm Research (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965) defines the sidereal month of 27.5 days as the period when the moon returns to the same position among the stars and the synodic lunar month of 29.5 days as the time when the moon returns to line up with the sun. Thus, the synodic lunar month is considered the time from new moon to new moon.

[20] Entrainment is the quality of two similarly timed beats to link up and become synchronized in each other’s presence.

[21] Richard W. Wrangham, “Out of the Pan, Into the fire: How Our Ancestors’ Evolution Depended on What They Ate,” Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution, ed. Frans B.M. de Waal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 121.

[22] Ibid., 123.

[23] Although A. habilis was first called Homo habilis, some anthropologists have argued that the fossils are closer to Australipithecus than Homo.

[27] Ibid., 270 and also Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers (Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 5. National Geographic is currently funding the establishment of eleven DNA-sampling centers around the world to collect 100,000 cheek swabs from indigenous peoples. The goal of the project, led by population geneticist Spencer Wells, is to trace the story of how humankind traveled from our origins in sub-Saharan Africa to populate the planet. This data collected over the next five years may give new insight and understanding to human migration and relationships. Michael Schnayerson, “The Map of Us All,” National Geographic Adventure (August 2005), 78-83, 89-90.

Why a woman’s wiggle while she walks shows she is ready for love

Their research revealed that women at the peak of their fertility cycles walk more slowly and seductively than those who are not.

This subtle change in behaviour is subconscious but has clear evolutionary benefits – as it makes a woman appear more attractive just at the time when she is most likely to fall pregnant, the research showed.

The girls were unaware of the nature of the study and were asked for a saliva sample to test for the presence of a hormone.

Levels of the hormone indicated whether they were approaching the most fertile time of the month.

…

Professor Nicolas Gueguen led the study at the behavioural sciences unit of the University of Bretagne-Sud in France.

…

For the ‘wiggle test’, he recruited 103 young women who were undergraduate business and social science students at his university – telling them he was conducting an experiment to test their word choices.

All were single, heterosexual and aged between 18 and 22.

He had already ruled out any who were using the contraceptive pill in case the hormones affected the experiment.

Each woman was individually asked to sit in a room and wait. After a short time, an attractive man entered and sat with them. The man was asked to smile at them and engage them in friendly conversation.

Unknown to the women, the man had been pre-selected for his attractiveness by a separate group of 31 women who had awarded him an average of 7.28 on a scale of 1 to 9.

The man then accompanied the women down a corridor to the laboratory, where they were told the study would take place. But without their knowledge, the man deliberately walked behind to film them.Once they reached the room, the women’s saliva was tested.

They were also then told the purpose of the experiment and asked for their permission to use the video footage. All gave their consent.

The results showed women at the peak of their fertility cycles were rated an average of 2.96 on the scale for sexiness, compared with 2.31 for those at the least fertile point.

The most fertile women also took about three seconds longer on average to complete the same short walk. Prof Gueguen and his researchers concluded: ‘We found that women near ovulation spent more time walking down a long hallway and their gaits were perceived to be sexier by males.

In his research Mr Gueguen is keen to point out other studies that have observed female behaviour, including one which involved watching women while they were seated in university cafeterias, bars or nightclubs.

The women used ‘subtle nonverbal behaviours such as nodding, leaning forward, self-touching, hair-flipping and hair-tossing in courtship and flirting relationships’, it says.

A study at speed-dating events found women who mimicked the behaviour of the men they were talking to were deemed more attractive than the other participants. And another found women with slightly enlarged pupils were considered more feminine.

Goths Tony and Angela Lightowler pose for wedding pictures during Whitby Gothic Weekend, in Whitby, England. Whitby was partly chosen because Bram Stoker wrote his famous Dracula story with the Gothic Whitby Abbey as his inspiration. The weekend has now grown from providing a few bands to include followers of Romanticism and Dracula.

Skadi Forum
Germanic & Pre-Germanic Origins Dedicated to general historical, social, linguistic, political and cultural topics pertinent to the development and origin of Germanics and to early (Indo-)Germanic tribes and groups, for the purpose of understanding ou
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